As we watch today’s Recreation and Park Commission meeting on extending political insider Tom Hsieh’s no-bid contract to run the once-public Gleneagles Golf Course — which is being contested by a rival group headed by venture capitalist Brian Smith and notorious landlord attorney Andrew Zacks — we can only hope that both sides lose and the public interest somehow reemerges from this muck and mire.Read more »

A person claiming to be an eyewitness to the fatal shooting of Alejandro Nieto has come forward to say he did not see Nieto point a Taser at police officers before they opened fire, according to attorney Adante Pointer, who is representing Nieto’s family.

The eyewitness, whose identity Pointer would not disclose, told the attorney that he “did not see Alex point a Taser at anybody” and “did not see or hear any back-and-forth exchange that police said took place,” Pointer said in a phone interview with the Bay Guardian.Read more »

As the nation's eyes watch police officers in Ferguson firing rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of protesters, one UC Berkeley sociologist is exploring how and why such violent conflicts erupt in the first place.

Nicholas Adams and his team call themselves Deciding Force. Its goal? To prevent violence between police and protesters at peaceful demonstrations through deep data analysis of the Occupy movement.Read more »

Midway through the introduction to More Curious (McSweeney's Books, 342 pp., $22), his recently-published collection of essays from the last 15 years, Sean Wilsey (who appears at the Booksmith Thu/21) reveals his quest to combine the styles of Thomas Pynchon and New Yorker legend Joseph Mitchell — paranoia and precision, respectively.

The introduction itself is a joyfully meta attempt at this very task. The 20-odd pages of often non-sequitorial rumination about the aforementioned authors, the triviality of the 1990s, and the first Obama election can be mistaken as “formless while still astonishingly informative” or “so intricately constructed and fact-filled that the form is too complex to be instantly identified.” The happy reality of all of Wilsey’s essays is somewhere between these two perceptions.

-- The venue formerly known as the Nob Hill Masonic Center will re-open next month as "The Masonic," a 3,300-seat music venue booked by Live Nation (as it was before), with new bars, food options, and a state-of-the-art sound system, after spending much of 2014 under construction. The lineup of shows so far has some pretty big hitters, with the Pixies, Broken Bells, Modest Mouse, and, um, Hall & Oates taking the stage in the coming months. Read more »

Feather was found around 7:30am on Sunday, Aug. 10 near Church and Duboce streets. Police are still looking for a white man in his 20s or 30s wearing a grey hoodie at the time of the attack. Police are reviewing camera footage which supposedly contains images of the attack, but have yet to release the footage to the public.

There’s a tipping point between constructive criticism and destructive disparagement, and when the latter category is layered with an onslaught of spam from spellcasters, solicitors, and scammers — well, those scales have now tipped for us at the Bay Guardian. We’ve decided to indefinitely suspend comments on SFBG.com.Read more »

The weather was gorgeous, the lines weren't too long, and the people were friendly -- and hungry -- at the sixth annual SF Street Food Festival last Saturday.

About those shorter lines, though -- that meant we had access to pretty much any food we wanted in less than 10 minutes! (Except for the ever-popular ramenburger from Nombe, the line for which stretched almost the length of a block.) Uh oh, we were faced with unlimited choices, too many for our stomachs to bear, try as we might. And we might!

Pro-Palestine activists marched on Saturday to block an Israeli ship scheduled to dock at the Port of Oakland, protesting Gaza violence.

Well over 1,000 protesters marched from the West Oakland BART station to the port to block the Zim Piraeus, operated by Zim Integrated Services, Ltd., from docking and unloading its goods. As of last night the ILWU respected the Block the Boat picket line. A police line met the protesters when they arrived.Read more »

We Guardianistas aren’t just tethered to our keyboards, writing stories for our weekly print and daily online editions. We’re also working the microphones at public events and online broadcast outlets on a regular basis, including our biweely Alternative Ink show on BFF.fm.Read more »

Editor’s Note: Aug. 19 marks the Bay Area Global Health Film Festival, hosted by the Institute for Global Orthopaedics and Traumatology. The theme of this year’s festival is “Road Traffic Safety Locally … and Globally,” and is geared toward raising awareness about the need for road traffic safety improvements. In this opinion piece, representatives from the University of California at San Francisco Orthopaedic Trauma Institute, at San Francisco General Hospital, describe how all-too-common accidents can permanently injure pedestrians and bicyclists. And they voice support for Proposition A, the San Francisco Transportation and Road Improvement Bond.

By Amber Caldwell and Nick Arlas

San Francisco is a transit-first city. Everyone shares the need to get safely from point A to point B, preferably quickly. And the various options for doing so span the full spectrum from driving, biking, and walking, to public transit like MUNI and Bart, rideshare programs, taxis, and companies like Uber and Lyft.

As we go about our daily lives, transportation is one of the most important public infrastructure systems that San Francisco relies upon. It encompasses many controversial issues and is linked to other social equity campaigns including housing advocacy and urban gentrification.

My earliest memories of Candlestick are formative ones. Like any Bay Area kid who cut her baseball teeth on Giants games at the notoriously frigid stadium, I thought every family prepared for sporting events by piling on 17 strategic layers and stuffing their car full of sleeping bags and other accoutrements that could double as equipment for scaling Mount Kilimanjaro. Read more »